Turnbull, Margaret C.

American astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution, Washington, DC. Turnbull
is a NASA Astrobiology Institute postdoctoral research associate in the
Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Together with
Jill Tarter she compiled HabCat
(Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems) to help guide future projects in SETI
and astrobiology aimed at finding life around other stars.

Earlier in her career, Turnbull was involved with the construction, setup,
testing, and repair of detectors and readout system for an Antarctic Muon
and Neutrino detector array. At the University of Wisconsin, she was involved
in detector preparation for the X-ray Quantum Calorimeter sub-orbital launch
experiment. At Lowell Observatory in Arizona, she participated in the examination
of main-belt and Earth-crossing asteroid orbital parameters and trends of
ephemeris uncertainty with orbital parameters. She has done Monte Carlo
modeling of high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope images of protostars
in the Taurus-Auriga dark cloud at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory. And in the radio domain, she has analyzed large-scale HI 21
cm emission from Seyfert galaxies imaged by the Very Large Array, and conducted
a search for obvious distortions caused by unseen companion galaxies.